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	A Marathon to Translate the Declaration of Internet Freedom by Paula Góes Global Voices   26 July 2012   The world may be glued to the TV to watch the start of the Olympic Games in London, but Global Voices Lingua translators are excited about another challenge: the Internet Freedom Translathon, a marathon to get the Declaration of Internet Freedom translated in as many languages and dialects as possible over the course of 24 hours on August 3. Everyone can join: you don"t have to be an Olympic athlete or professional translator to help!   Lingua is partnering with New American Foundation and Free Press to provide official versions of the declaration in a number of languages. Since the Declaration was posted on Global Voices Advocacy last weekend, our translators have rendered the text into 20 languages. Global Voices content is currently translated into almost 30 languages by our volunteers, a big achievement but a small fraction of the 6,909 known living languages catalogued by Ethnologue.   This means that there is one language for every 862,000 people on Earth: Europe alone accounts for only 234 of them, whereas in Asia 2,322 languages are spoken on a daily basis. We hope to offer the declaration in as many of them as possible, even in artificial languages: from Solresol to Esperanto, there are 200 auxlangs in which the declaration would look great too! And with your help and luck, we can even hope to reach impromptu translators of those 46 languages that have just a single speaker.   The Internet Freedom Translathon is part of the Summer of Internet Freedom, a series of events taking place this August to encourage Internet users to continue the global conversation about the role of the Internet in our lives and how we can keep it free and open. It is also a way to engage with the Declaration and to show public support for Internet freedom. Anyone can host offline or online events, anywhere around the world.   http://globalvoicesonline.org/-/type/video/ Visit the related web page
	Strange facts about violent death by Praveen Swami The Hindu India   July 2012   A civilian is more likely to die in a firearms homicide in some parts of the U.S. than in terrorism-linked violence in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kashmir.   From 2006 to 2010, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data shows that a civilian was much more likely to die in a firearms homicide in the U.S. than in terrorism-linked violence in Kashmir. In 2009 and 2010, Louisiana residents were more at risk of being killed by a murderer with a gun than Iraqis — and have been consistently more vulnerable than Afghans. Bar one single year, Sri Lanka’s civilians were less likely to be shot dead in their civil war than U.S. residents.   Last week’s Batman-inspired carnage in Colorado has sparked off an intense debate on the assailant’s sanity, motives and possible grievances against society. These aren’t, and ought not be, important questions. The FBI’s data shows Mr. Holmes’ psychopathic assault fits in a larger, terrifying landscape of firearms homicides in the U.S. — a consequence of a loose weapons-control regime giving far too easy access to lethal weapons. It also tells us something important, though, about the way we comprehend terror, be it political or psychopathic.   In a 2006 article, the journalist Ronald Bailey provided a long list of greater risks to U.S. residents than terror: among them walking across the street (1:48,500) and drowning (1:88,000).   To that list, scholars John Mueller and Mark Stewart added such improbable causes: drowning in a bathtub or crashing into deer. In a 2010 article, they pointed out that developed countries deemed risks unacceptable if they involved a prospect of fatality higher than 1 in 100,000 — less than a sixteenth, for example, of Washington DC’s firearms homicide rate in 2010. For the risk of terrorism to reach that 1:100,000 benchmark, Mueller and Stewart pointed out, “the number of fatalities from terrorist attacks in the United States and Canada would have to increase 35-fold; in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland), more than 50-fold; and in Australia, more than 70-fold. For the United States, this would mean experiencing attacks on the scale of 9/11 at least once a year, or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year.”   Last year, the South Asia Terrorism Portal Database records, India suffered 602 fatalities, of combatants and civilians, in Maoist violence, another 183 in Jammu and Kashmir, 95 in Assam, 65 in Manipur, 28 in Meghalaya, 15 in Nagaland, and one in Tripura — all told, 387. For each of the victims’ families and loved ones, the deaths are unacceptable but for a country of 1.2 billion people, they involve too many decimal places to constitute an existential threat. Even the 134,000 people who died in Indian traffic accidents in 2010 — an order of magnitude greater than terrorism victims — don’t reach anywhere near the 1:100,000 serious risk benchmark.   None of this is a reason for India — or anywhere else — not to take terrorism and violent crime seriously. Terrorism can, as the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate, degenerate into civil war — and then cross any acceptable benchmarks, just as firearms violence in the U.S. has. The data does, however, give reason for countries like India to rethink just how serious the threat posed by terrorism in fact is.   For two reasons, comparison between firearm fatalities in the U.S. and global insurgencies should be treated with care. The first is obvious: wars don’t make for easy body counts. Then, firearms fatalities in homicides are clearly different to terrorist attacks.   In the U.S., much of the worst violence is the consequence of gang-linked warfare, targeting bystanders far less than participants. In this sense, the data compares apples and, if not oranges, not quite apples. Nonetheless, the data gives a clear sense of the scale of carnage small arms can inflict.   Experts like Tara Kartha have long argued that the critical determinant of the intensity of conflicts isn’t the causes that underpin them, but their access to weapons and ordnance. The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey has detailed studies that make this point. Populations across the world have a welter of grievances, some of whom choose to seek redress through violence. Those with access to weapons are, obviously, most likely to inflict carnage.   Last week, the United Nations undertook negotiations on a small arms treaty that is intended to regulate the $60 billion trade in small arms, hopefully cutting back the lethality of insurgents and criminal groups. Though questions remain on the on-ground impact. For one, nation-states are themselves the principal agents of illegal weapons transfers. No treaty will stop criminal syndicates with vast cash reserves at their disposal from tapping corrupt suppliers.   Even as nations have invested billions in fighting terrorism, precious little has been done to shut down the tools with which terrorists fight.   In his 1835 masterwork, Democracy in America, the French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville enthusiastically hailed the invention of firearms as among a series of world-historic events which had “turned to the advantage of equality,” since they “equalised the villain and the noble on the field of battle.” This it did — but not quite to the utopian, democracy-inducing ends de Tocqueville imagined.   For decades now, policy-making on terrorism has focussed on how to fight terrorists. The U.S.’ homicide figures show it is even more important on keeping guns out of those who might wish us harm.   Experiments with Gandhi in Putin land, by Vladimir Radyuhin.   “After the death of Mahatma Gandhi, there’s nobody left to talk to,” Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin sarcastically joked five years ago commenting on the violations of human rights and freedoms in the West. The Kremlin’s reaction to recent peaceful protests in Moscow has recalled Mr. Putin’s remark.   “It seems that Gandhi has come back to haunt Putin,” the daily Vedomosti said. Indeed, it may be no exaggeration to say the anti-Putin protests that began in December with mass rallies and demonstrations against Mr. Putin’s return as President are increasingly reminiscent of Gandhi’s satyagraha against the British Raj.   Russian protesters have been on the streets and setting up Occupy-type camps in the Russian capital, dispersing at the first police order and offering no resistance when detained. Writers and artists have organised peaceful “strolls” along Moscow boulevards in support of the protests.   “Gandhi successfully used nonviolent resistance to drive the British out of India,” the newspaper noted.   The protesters say they want to transform Russia’s authoritarian political system into genuine democracy. Their demands include enacting new electoral legislation to ensure “fair, transparent and competitive elections,” and having new parliamentary and presidential polls as the election to the Duma in December and for President in March were marred by charges of large-scale falsification.   Civic activism   Initially, Mr. Putin not only welcomed the new civic activism, he also claimed credit for it. “These changing demands on government, and the fact that the middle class is exiting the narrow world of increasing its own prosperity, are the results of our efforts. We have worked for that to happen,” he wrote in his presidential campaign manifesto.   But now the Russian leader refuses to talk to the opposition. When asked by journalists why the Kremlin was not initiating dialogue with the protesters, his reply was that opposition activists “do not have a common platform, so there is nobody to talk to.”   Indeed, the protests lack structure, programme or formal leaders. Driven by educated urban classes they have so far been largely confined to Moscow and St. Petersburg, but have gathered impressive momentum at least in the Russian capital. Half a dozen rallies and marches organised largely through the internet since December have each gathered tens of thousands of participants. Experts predict that the protest movement will only grow.   For the time being, though, opposition activists are a minority and Mr. Putin is trying to pit them against the majority that supported him in his presidential bid.   One of the first personnel decisions Mr. Putin made after taking office in May was to reward with high government office an engineer from a tank factory who had promised in December to bring his fellow workers to Moscow to help police deal with the protesters.   Mr. Putin appointed engineer Igor Kholmanskikh as the presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District, one of only seven such top regional posts in Russia. Thanking the man for his support Mr. Putin said that “Russian labourers, from factory workers to engineers” were the “real Russian people,” in contrast with “those idlers and blabbermouths” who demonstrated in Moscow.   Punk rockers   “The Kremlin is working hard to widen the rift between the big cities and the provinces that came to the surface during the recent presidential election,” said political analyst Alexander Kynev.   The tactic is best illustrated by the trial of feminist punk rockers who chanted a “punk prayer” against Mr. Putin. Wearing brightly-coloured ski masks, the Pussy Riot group sang “Mother Mary, drive Putin away” inside Russia’s largest Orthodox cathedral in Moscow two weeks before the March vote that saw Mr. Putin regain the presidency for a third time.   Three band members, all in their 20s, have since been kept behind bars, and face up to seven years in jail on hooliganism charges. Their arrest and trial, which began last Friday, has deeply polarised Russian society.   While many intellectuals and residents of big cities came out against a “medieval witch hunt,” 70 per cent of Russians said the punk group had committed a punishable offence against the Russian Orthodox Church and an insult to all believers.   “Authorities are deliberately blowing the punk rockers case out of proportions in order to discredit the opposition and consolidate the conservative part of society,” wrote a Russian newspaper.   Radicalisation   In a parallel strategy, after his re-instalment as President, Mr. Putin rushed through the Parliament a slew of laws designed to stifle the protest movement. The legislators have sharply increased up to $20,000 fines for unsanctioned rallies and demonstrations, required independent non-government organisations (NGOs) that receive any foreign funding to register as “foreign agents,” made libel and slander of government officials a criminal offence, and given the government power to close down without a court order websites accused of hosting illegal content.   The laws signalled a radical departure from a pro-democracy course championed by the Kremlin when current Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was President. It was shortly before stepping down from the top Kremlin job, that Mr. Medvedev decriminalised defamation. Six months later, however, he supported reclassifying it as a felony.   Analysts have suggested that the Kremlin may be deliberately provoking radicalisation of the protest movement in the hope that this will push away from it moderate supporters. This strategy may work on condition that the social situation in the country remains stable.   However, some experts warn that a wave of social protests that may rise in the provinces in the coming fall, when people feel the full impact of July’s 12 per cent hike in the price of household energy supplies and coming cuts in social spending dictated by the global economic slowdown.   If social unrest merges with the radicalised political dissent, Mr. Putin may regret refusing to talk to today’s Gandhian-style protesters.
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